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His springtime collection of pastel-toned Mao
jackets, Emma
Goldman spectacles and Che berets might not pass
muster with John
Ashcroft’s fashion police, but don’t be fooled by the
seasonal/sartoriopolitical excesses: Beneath The Gay Blade’s studded
patent-leather cummerbund beats the heart of a True Son of Liberty.

And like his fellow Joes Public, most of this utensil’s early-April
cycles were devoted to the mundane task of rendering a suitable accounting
to the Internal Revenue Service; his dog-eared I Ching and
oil-slick “Twister” mat bear mute witness to the
cerebrum-pummeling strenuousness of his accounting efforts.

The new quadraphonic eight-track system cunningly plastered into
the walls of the retiring room? A business procurement, of course, intended
to put the fidelity of Apple’s iTunes to the ultimate torture test.
The seven-foot-long, steel-ribbed rawhide papoose board? An
entertainment expense, pure and simple. Those four pounds of psychoactive
cactus buttons? A
charitable contribution to the Native American Church.

And if his reasoned appeal to fiscal fairness don’t fly with the Feds,
internal tax exile is always an option: This burrow’s nooks and crannies run
almost as deep and twisted as its proprietor. Roll over, Mark Rich, and tell
Randy Weaver the news!

Deliverance

Speaking of mazelike escape routes, members of the Blade’s ZZ
Top-bearded high-country militia have emerged from their mountain
redoubt long enough to shed a small pool of light on the Byzantine doings within the
Quark compound.

Since the departure of cuddly
terrycloth mommy Tim Gill
back in October 2000, they confirm, the scratchy chicken-wire administration
of CEO Fred Ebrahimi has become ever more restrictive; those strictures
include widely reported changes to Quark’s laissez-faire
culture and mass redirection of programming resources from the
company’s HQ in Boulder, Colo., to an offshore hydroponics
farm near New Delhi (a move foreshadowed in
these virtual pages way back in July 2000).

But where’s all that code-crunching energy being channeled, Maynard?
Certainly not into the recently delivered QuarkXPress 5.0, which (handsome
and XMLicious though that release proved to be) took four years to
concoct and still doesn’t afford native support for Mac OS X.

Instead, these hirsute sources report, Quark has trained its muskets on a
bigger prize: delivering enterprise publishing’s next generation of
comprehensive client-server goodness in the form of a radical rewrite to
QuarkDMS (Digital Media System), the content- and asset-management software
media moguls ask for by name.

Besides beefing up its current arsenal of features, the revamped QuarkDMS
will reportedly cop the workflow-management chops of the company’s Quark
Publishing System and armor-plate them (via Quark’s dogged XML development
efforts) as a truly industrial-strength multipublishing system designed to
make Adobe Systems’ HQ look like Tora Bora on a bad day.

Indeed, Ebrahimi apparently envisions this project as Ground Zero in a
final, apocalyptic battle between his burgeoning colonial empire and the forces
of Adobe; Il Duce
has been swinging his beloved riding crop with increasing abandon of late to
ensure the trains keep running on time for a fall launch date. Tutto nello stato, niente contro lo stato, nulla al di fuori
dello stato!

Take it from the Blade’s school of hard knocks: Even if diapered, the IRS doesn’t consider an organ-grinder’s
monkey a dependent. Got a tip of your own, possibly pertaining to the
Mac industry? Drop a line to The NMR Report, and a neatly
bundled mole rat could be yours!